New Amazon EC2 Competitor: Cloudlayer's pricing announced

I'm glad to see SoftLayer getting into this space. However, there are still some things I'd like to know more about.<p>For example, Amazon's Elastic Block Storage can be snapshotted to S3 (with at least 3 copies in at least two availability zones) very easily. Does CloudLayer's SAN storage offer such ease of backups? I see EVault is offered for about $1/GB which is really expensive compared to Amazon's backups. Can IP addresses be transferred between boxes? What if the boxes are in different data centers? Is the billing only monthly or will it be pro-rated hourly? Can CloudLayer instances be used in conjunction with SoftLayer's hardware load balancing and other services like that which Amazon doesn't offer?

Higher prices than EC2? I was hoping for something that would make Amazon cut their prices or beef up their RAM offering.<p>To compare:<p><pre><code> CloudLayer: 1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage - $99.00 EC2: 1 Core + 1.7GB RAM + 100GB Elastic Block Storage - $82.00</code></pre>

From a little investigation, it's not really an Amazon EC2 competitor. I'd consider it closer to Slicehost and Linode.<p>It turns out the instances are only offered on a month-to-month deal, not by-the-hour.

What kind of IOPS/transfer speeds are people getting from Cloudlayer or similar "disk clouds"? This storage with its encryption sounds secure, robust but slow. Would one use NFS or some SAN/iSCSI/networked blocked device and put some kind of distributed file system on that?<p>Or perhaps one needs to plan an architecture where you never block on any disk read, writes being usually buffered?<p>I'll note that my app probably relies a lot on files for data access rather than throwing everything in an SQL database (and I wonder how Postgres would fare on such a shared disk system)

I'm actually shopping through these different hosting services today, so this is very timely for me. What I'm really liking about CloudLayer is their ability to expand my HD storage capacity (a feature which is important to me as I operate a crawler). Linode and Slicehost don't seem to offer that and, so far, CloudLayer is looking pretty competitive with EC2. Does anyone know of any other services that offer that?<p>The unlimited incoming bandwidth is great too.

regardless of price and features, any new competition is good for the consumer

Others should learn from this: free/unlimited inbound bandwidth encourages people to upload data into the cloud. Sounds like a nice platform for building crawlers.